Mr Robot and Person of Interest: Getting there, eventually

It used to be so easy to keep track of all the interesting TV shows. There were only two channels in our house until I was 18, so it was easy to follow everything that looked the tiniest bit interesting. But now there is literally access to everything all of the time, and it can take some time to catch up with genuinely great stuff.

Sure, we'll watch Squid Game, probably next year sometime. And we'll see if Severance nails the landing before even committing to anything. (Sometimes this works really well, and we'll wait on something like the first season of Heroes, and everybody said not to bother after that, so that was that.) And sometimes I'll just be totally ignorant of pop culture behemoths like Stranger Things.

But I get there in the end with some shows, even if it does take years. It's surprising how easy it is to avoid twists when you have no skin in the game, and when you do get there, you can still be as shocked by all the plot turns as the people who got into it at the start.

So we just started watching Mr Robot, which is loads of fun and already weirdly dated, and I carved my way through every season of Person of Interest just last year. (Couldn't give a shit about the AI shenanigans, but loved the fighting, loved the terseness of its very serious characters, loved Detective bloody Fosco, and adored the way you could watch everybody working around Jim Cavezial and barely disguising their loathing of the man. Excellent work all round.)

It takes you out of the cultural conversation, but sometimes that's a pleasant silence - I have absolutely no interest in reading any think-pieces about Succession ever, because 99% of the writing about Succession is dumb as fuck. And outside the hype, it's easier to get a clearer view of the merits and defects on anything. 

It just takes some patience, and a willingness to led the flood of new stories flow over you and away. It's so easy.